Category: Hacking

James Webb Space Telescope and Astronomy

JWST goes well into the infrared
Launch Autumn/winter 2018 — lots of things that can go wrong, but these engineers are awesome.
Science proposals start November 2017.
Routine science observations start six months after launch.
Compared to next-gen observatories, JWST is an old school telescope. We can bring it into the 21st century with better tools for research.
Coordination of development tools with Astropy developers.
Watch the clean room live on the WebbCam(ha!).

Open Source Hardware in Astronomy

hardware.astronomy
Bringing the open hardware movement to astronomy
1) Develop low(er) cost astronomical instruments
2) Invest undergrads in the development (helps keep costs low).
3) Make hardware available to broader community
4) develop an open standard for hardware in astronomy

Citizen Science with the Zooniverse: turning data into discovery (Oxford)

Crowdsourcing has been proven effective at dealing with large, messy data in many cases across different fields.
Amateur consensus agrees with experts 97% of the time (experts agree with each other 98% of the time), and remaining 3% are deemed “impossible” even by experts.
Create your own zooniverse!

Gaffa tape and string: Professional hardware hacking (in astronomy)

Spectra with fiber optic cables on a focal plane.
Move the cables to new locations.
Use a ring-magnet and piezoelectric movement to move “Starbugs” around — messy, inefficient.
Prototyped a vacuum solution that worked fine! This is now the final design.
Hacking/lean prototypes/live demos are effective in showing and proving results to people. Kinks can be ironed out later, but faith is won in showing something can work.

Open Science with K2

Science is woefully underfunded.
Qatar World Cup ($220 billion) vs. Kepler mission ($0.6 billion)
Open science disseminates research and data to all levels of society.
We need more than a bunch of papers on the ArXiv.
Zooniverse promotes active participation.
K2 mission shows the impact of extreme openness.
Kepler contributed immensely to science, but it was closed.
Large missions are too valuable to give exclusively to the PI team — don’t build a wall.
Proprietary data slows down science, misses opportunities for limited-lifetime missions, blocks early-career researchers, and reduces diversity by favoring rich universities.
People are afraid of getting scooped, but we can have more than one paper.
Putting work on GitHub is publishing, and getting “scooped” is actually plagiarism.
K2 is basically a huge hack — using solar photon pressure to balance an axis after K1 broke.
Open approach: no proprietary data, funding other groups to do the same science, requires large programs to keep data open.
K2 vs K1: The broken spacecraft with a 5x smaller budget has more authors and most publications, and more are early-career researchers because all the data is open. 2x increase, and a more fair representation of the astro community.
Call to action: question restrictive policies and proprietary periods. Question the idea of one paper for the same dataset or discovery. Don’t fear each other as competition — fear losing public support.
The next mission will have open data from Day 0 thanks to K2.